We're about to lift the world's expectations about building and managing websites even further. SilverStripe 2.2.0 is a major release containing a staggering quantity of new features and work from our ten Google Summer of Code students and an equally impressive effort from the core team.

Overview of new features:

Redesigned interface and workflow:

Elijah Lofgren, Sean Harvey and Will Rossiter added hundreds of usability improvements, judiciously removed clutter from the interface, and reduced the steps to perform common tasks. The result: more fun and productivity for the content editor!

Every interface got a little clean up. Here's an example from the files and images area:

Some of the other highlights include:

Overall colour scheme updated

Less "dead space": more of your screen is a useful editing area.

Inserting images and links made easier

Sitemap area less cluttered, contains resizeable panes

Publish several pages at once

Search for pages within the admin area

Sitemap Drag & Drop function more intuitive

Drag & Drop file management

Dangerous actions turn red when you mouse over them

Lots of mouse-over tooltips added

Improved the "Save changes to your page?" popup.

Buttons like "Save" animate once pressed, to inform you of progress.

Dozens of phrases in the application renamed for improved clarity and consistency

Elijah was very methodical when doing his work. You can read his complete and rather impressive worklog for a detailed account of most of the usability improvements made in SilverStripe 2.2 ...

Multiple language support for the CMS

Thanks to Summer of Code student Bernat Foj Capell and his mentor Ingo Schommer along with initial translators/testers, the SilverStripe administration interface has been translated from English into:

Multiple-language support for the public-facing pages of your website

As well as the backend administration system being multi-lingual, thanks to Bernat you can now also have your public-facing webpages in any language you want. As an example, see demo.silverstripe.com in french!

SilverStripe flexibly lets you author and translate in language combinations that suit you. For instance, you can choose to have the administration system in English while translating the public-facing page into French:

Online image editing. Impulsively upload files.

It's always been easy to insert and resize images to put them in to SilverStripe pages, especially since it automatically resamples your images ensuring they're small in filesize and download time. The competition is still to catch up on this, but now we've raised the bar considerably further:

Select multiple files and upload in one step

Crop, resize, and rotate images

Add new folders to keep images organised

... all without moving away from the page you are editing.

Mateusz certainly gets to Pass Go and Collect $200 for the months of work enhancing these fundamental features of SilverStripe!

Improved rank in Google

Every SilverStripe website now sports a special file, sitemap.xml, that ensures Google knows about all of the pages on your site. SilverStripe also informs Google whenever you publish a new page to encourage immediate inclusion (Read more about this technology on Wikipedia.)

These features are thanks to Will Scott, another of our Google Summer of Code contributes. He will later be releasing Google Adwords and Analytics modules.

Reporting Engine to quickly code up custom reports

Quin Hoxie built a graphical reporting system that lets developers produce stunning bar and pie graphs. This release contain a few reports out of the box, and you can look forward to futher reports in subsequent months.

The focus however, is letting developers be more productive by making short work of writing new custom graphs for websites they build.

Quin wowed us initially with the graphs he used in his code sample for his Google Summer of Code application. We're thrilled with where this is going and excited with the technology it uses; the canvas element. (Despite concerns, yes this works in Internet Explorer!)

Webwide single signon via OpenID

Sick of maintaining a hundred seperate accounts on various websites that you use? Waste time resetting passwords to a system you've not used recently? Worried that you use the same password on a bunch of different sites?

Newsletter module enhancements

It's now even quicker to setup, is more intuitive to use, features more reports, allows you resend old newsletters, and handle bounces better... letting you manage your newsletter announcements in increased confidence.

Developer tools, more APIs make it more fun to be a SilverStripe geek

The geek in you will love the hundreds of new features and bug fixes to the underlying framework underneath SilverStripe. Check out our new Tutorial 5 to explain some new features, and check the changelog for the exhaustive list!

Thank you very much Google!

A staggering proportion of the SilverStripe 2.2 release is due to the ten students we had through the generous support of the Google Summer of Code programme. Between them, they wrote thousands of lines of code and and worked solidly for many months! So a big thanks go out to Google for seriously supporting open source projects like ours.

Donning our beloved new Google shirts from left to right are SilverStripe core team members who oversaw the Google student work: Sam Minnee, Sigurd Magnusson, Brian Calhoun, Sean Harvey, Ingo Schommer and Matt Peel.

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Comments

most of these things don't actually work ANYMORE.
it seems there are just too many bugs and not enough documentation for this great piece of software.
The basic system works great, but many of the modules don't actually work (except for the few listed in the modules-section)

Posted on 25 Mar 2009
by alex

Below Sigurd says "Thanks, fixed!", but does not say what is fixed. I just installed this program and when I go the statistics page I can't do anything on that page because of Javascript errors, specifically "G_vmlCanvasManager is not defined" appears to be the error.

Posted on 1 Aug 2008
by David McGuffin

wow :-)
http://dobrywypoczynek.eu

Posted on 9 Dec 2007
by wypoczynek

I confirmed the bug when trying to change the page name and using numbers at the end. I thought it might only allow for a certain character limit for page name, but when I used letters instead of numbers on the end, it worked. This should be fixed.

Posted on 9 Dec 2007
by Buddy

Btw, awesome work ss!

Posted on 4 Dec 2007
by Simon

Most modern browsers spell check for you. :-)
get firefox :-)

Posted on 4 Dec 2007
by Simon

Where's the spellchecker?

Posted on 4 Dec 2007
by Speller

Jason, thanks for the comment. I tried this at demo.silverstripe.com and can confirm for a few small cases (where you have a number less than about 10000) you're right. You can always set the actual page name as a workaround in the Metadata tab. Will load as a ticket to solve.
Ronald - Understood. Are you using IE by any chance? Can you confirm that it is also slow at http://demo.silverstripe.com/ for you, which will rule out a misconfigured server at your end? One of the big issues is the TinyMCE editor that we use, and we hope its not too big a task to upgrade when their next (more compact) edition is released. In addition, there may be some compaction we can do on our side, too.

Posted on 30 Nov 2007
by Sigurd Magnusson

Sigurd - I believe that the php code itself is not the major issue in the loading speed of the admin panel - but is the shear amount of files that has to be loaded up.
I'm on a AMD 3500+ processor with 1 GB ram on CentOS with PHP5, Zend Optimiser and eAccelerator in a VPS environment that has very little load.
On average each file that is loaded takes 80ms - this however is not loaded in parallel - it is sequential - and it takes 9 seconds just to load up all the nessessary files.
I think you'll find you'll obtain a very healthy speed boast to SS in general if you combined all images into a single file and use CSS selectors to reference the image.
In addition - you can slap all your js code into a single file and minimise it (not packing it) so there is a single js file to load.
Same idea with the css - no reason to use 10+ css files unless you're telling me that in fact the css have to be different because each file is huge and is loaded dynamically dependent on content.
Also - the 10+ seconds to load up the site is a first fire timing - after which the browser caches most content and it'll load up in less than 3 seconds - but this depends on how the browser handles the cache and the "first impression" is really taken back from what SS really has to offer.

Posted on 30 Nov 2007
by Ronald

SS appears to have great potential, so I installed 2.2 and tried playing around with it on my server. Looks great so far, but I have encountered one showstopping bug: when I change a "Page name" in Content > Main and it asks me whether to change the URL, the resultant URL always has the last character cut off. So, for example, 2007 becomes 200/. Fix that and I'll be happy to try this out further; polish everything more and I'll be hooked for sure!
Thanks for working hard to try to make our work easier. :)